Posts tagged Flecks

I don’t know if I have been missing the emails telling me about upcoming Flecks or if there just hasn’t een one in a while, but tonight was my first Flecks in quite some time. Flecks, if you’re just tuning in, is a tradition at ILM where they watch horrible, terrible movies and heckle the screen. Tonight’s gem was Transmorphers, a direct-to-DVD movie to jump on the Transformers hype.

Transmorphers is brought to us by The Asylum, the same company (and director!) who brought us the glory of Snakes on a Train. This movie was actually markedly better than Snakes was! I know, it’s hard to believe. Instead of being the worst movie ever, it was perhaps the 27th worst movie ever.

Picture every sci-fi movie cliche you can imagine. Picture tidbits culled from Battlestar Galactica and the Matrix. Picture visual effects about as the first animation homework at art school. You picturing all that? Are you smiling? Then you must be a masochist and Flecks is for you!

There was something about it being the future and an invasion by robots that wiped out 90% of the human population. I think they were living underground? And apparently gay marriage is legal in the future because there was the required lesbian bit with a married female couple. Other than that, it’s a blur of terrible dialog, horrible acting and poor combat scenes. Then we watched the VFX special feature on the DVD. That was a hoot. Sitting there with folks from ILM watching some yahoo talk in remedial language about his effects work was just too much. Oh, it was good.

I have been remiss in sharing my most recent adventures. I know return to tell you of not one, but two fantastic Flecks experiences. This would be the viewing of two of the worst movies ever. Really. Even worse than Snakes on a Train. I don’t know how I can keep going to these movie showings. And yet I do.

First up is the September Flecks showing, Turkish Superman! This one had a major good factor going for it – it was short. And that was about the only good thing. First off, let me say that the copy we were viewing looked like a poor video transfer. And it had no subtitles. That’s right, we watched the whole movie with only our vivid imaginations to fill in the dialog. I’m guessing we didn’t miss much. It starts with a scene of space. Or what is supposed to be space. It’s really just Christmas tree ornaments and possibly Cheerios. They look at “space” for perhaps 5 minutes. I’m not kidding. It was five whole minutes of just looking at the fantasticness of their version of space. Yawn.

Next we see Superman conversing with his parents? An older woman and man, and there seems to be some disagreement. He packs his bags and leaves for his Fortress of Solitude which wasn’t quite up to par. Then there’s weird scenes of him at a desk at work and I can’t even recall the whole thing. I’ve blanked it out. But the combat scenes were awesome. They’d try to make it look like he’d used some special super power to jump from on high and really he’d do a little hop and there’d be a camera cut. Um. We weren’t fooled. Or he’d punch someone and get no where near making even vague contact. Oh, it was hilarious.

The flight scenes were great too. They took a really bad image of him in a flying pose and just plopped it down over some stock footage. Look, it’s Turkish Superman in front of some trees! Look, he’s flying over a Coliseum! Sure he is. Oh yes, it was hilarious. And then it ended. And we knew it was the end because the Christmas tree ornaments came back. We all cheered (or at least I gave a mental cheer) with excitement knowing it was over. Dum dum daaa. Until next time!

And what was next time, you ask? Oh, it was good. It was sooo good. Because it was a movie with the champion of Knight Riding, Mr. David Hasselhoff! The gem was called Starcrash, and it was really really bad. It was endlessly long. Even the Flecks crew eventually ran out of humorous commentary and we just sat there, rather numb. You should definitely go to this site and check out the awesome images.

The movie was post-Star Wars, and it was just such a poor version of the original. It started with a giant spaceship passing overhead. But the ship looked worse than a bunch of Legos. It was awful. And things didn’t really improve. Though there was one fantastic battle scene where they were sending this missile/bullet things through space. They hit the enemy spaceship, BROKE THROUGH A GLASS WINDOW, IN SPACE, and opened up to reveal troops who then proceeded to fight. In the decompressed chamber. Because the filmmakers didn’t even care about worrying about that sort of thing. Though in other scenes there were space suits and helmets and everything. It was wildly inconsistent. I don’t recommend this one to any but the heartiest of souls who can withstand extended pain. Else seek your amusement otherwheres.